Can zombies have sex? It’s one of the most-common questions posed to experts on the reanimated, human-flesh-eating corpses. And it’s a question that Bradley Voytek, a neuroscientist, is prepared to dissect—in lots of nerdy neurological detail.
After co-writing a study on the zombie brain, Mr. Voytek was included in a panel of experts at last year’s Comic-Con International, an annual science-fiction convention in San Diego. The panel, which was poised to respond to such pressing issues of zombie physiology, as well as history and apocalypse preparedness, included science-fiction authors and specialists in the undead.
At the center was Max M. Brooks, who wrote The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, an apocalyptic thriller set to be released in 2013 as a movie starring Brad Pitt. The crowd, Mr. Voytek assumed, would undoubtedly want details of the film and Mr. Pitt, and the neuroscientist was prepared to sit back and be eclipsed by the famed author.
But then an audience member asked about pleasure responses in the zombie brain. Then another fan asked about motor control. Another question came from a neuroscience student, another from a stroke victim, and the questions kept coming.
In his response to the question about zombie pleasure, Mr. Voytek explained that zombies might have damage to the region of the brain that helps inhibit impulses and cravings: the orbitofrontal cortex. “The part of your brain,” he explained, “that is in the front, and above the orbits of your eyes—orbital, frontal. You’re all going to remember it.”
Thirty minutes after the session closed, comic addicts lingered to pitch neuroscience questions in the guise of zombie fiction.
“It’s funny to me that the best method I’ve found to engage the public in science is with something so fantastical and made up,” says Mr. Voytek, who completed his doctorate in neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley in 2010. That same year, his zombie project began, and since then he has given dozens of public talks, been featured in Forbes, New York Magazine, and the French version of Slate, among other publications, and spoken on panels at international science-fiction conferences multiple times each year.
The one place he has been hesitant to promote, or even reveal, his undead-brain research is on his curriculum vitae. As he applied for his current postdoctoral research position last year, his Ph.D. adviser, Robert T. Knight suggested he “scrub it clean” of zombies.
“I didn’t want him to be known as a ‘media guy,’” says Mr. Knight, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Berkeley. To be taken seriously as a researcher, Mr. Knight cautioned, you should avoid seeming like a limelight-grabber and balance fun outreach with hard-core science.
Mr. Voytek’s partner in the zombie research, Timothy Verstynen, received an equally discouraging response from one of his advisers.
While finishing postdoctoral research and beginning his faculty job search, Mr. Verstynen was told by a senior adviser that he considered his outreach work a “stupid idea” and a huge career mistake.
“I think it was a kind of protectiveness,” says Mr. Verstynen, who earned his Ph.D. in neuroscience at Berkeley in 2006. Anything that detracts from research could hurt a young researcher on the job market.
‘Forensic Neuroscience’?
In his job applications, Mr. Verstynen cautiously discussed his work on zombie brains as a “forensic neuroscience” talk in his teaching statement. “Although tongue-in-cheek,” Mr. Verstynen wrote in the statement, “this talk has proven to be a successful and entertaining way of using popular culture to educate about real neuroscience.” He stated clearly that he would slash the brain-craving corpses from his work if it meant getting a faculty position.
Like Mr. Voytek, he got a range of responses, both positive and negative, from potential employers. At interviews, some faculty said it was a benefit to his career, and Michael J. Tarr, a director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, jointly operated by Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, suggested having the center’s Web site link to Mr. Verstynen’s zombie-brain talk if he joined.
Ultimately, he received multiple job offers and accepted a tenure-track position this year at Carnegie Mellon University, which openly supports outreach projects like the zombie talks. In fact, Mr. Tarr has even asked Mr. Verstynen to give his zombie-brain talk to prospective graduate students when they visit campus.
He and Mr. Voytek also received affirmation for their work from the academic-publishing world, signing a book deal this year with Princeton University Press, which plans to to publish the zombie-brain research in the style of a Neuroscience 101 textbook.
Still, the pressure to publish frequently and the stigma surrounding academics who attract a lot of media attention can deter faculty who want to pursue public outreach, particularly if their topics are unconventional like the zombie talks. But Mr. Verstynen believes such work is worth the career risks, particularly at a time when Americans are often thought to be embarrassingly uninformed about science.
An Appetite for Brains
The zombie neuroscience project emerged from a friendship that started in 2004, when Mr. Voytek joined the graduate program at Berkeley where Mr. Verstynen was already a student. The duo quickly bonded over data analyses and sci-fi movies. In his work, Mr. Verstynen studied the motor cortex, the regions of our brains that allow us to plan and control movements, such as using our hands to pick up an object. In 2006, as Mr. Verstynen moved to his first postdoctoral position at the University of California at San Francisco, Mr. Voytek continued with his own work studying how stroke victims can recover brain functions, particularly memory and attention.
The two continued to meet over beers to talk science fiction and science.
Mr. Voytek had acquired a taste for lecturing as a teaching assistant, which led to an evening lecturer position at Berkeley. “I took a pay cut so that I could keep teaching” students, he says. “My entire job is to think about things that are cool. I wanted to make science accessible to them, too.”
With coaching from his wife, Jessica, who has a background in communications, he honed his speaking skills. In 2005 he won the award for outstanding graduate-student instructor for two classes. He branched out to giving talks on introductory neuroscience at public libraries and during “Nerd Night” in San Francisco, part of an international program that organizes public lectures. In 2010 he gave a presentation at TEDxBerkeley, an independently organized conference modeled after the global idea-sharing TED conferences.
A video of his TEDx talk, in which he hinted of his equal love for brains and science fiction, drew the attention of Matt Mogk, a science-fiction writer and head of the Zombie Research Society, who asked him to join the society’s advisory board. His group promotes research-based debate about all things zombie. “Zombies are rooted in science, not superstition and myth,” Mr. Mogk says. “They don’t fly; they don’t go to your high school and steal your girlfriend.”
His proposal to Mr. Voytek was to help answer a single question: What might a zombie brain look like?
Mr. Voytek talked it over carefully with his wife. He didn’t want to trivialize his neuroscience research, Ms. Voytek recalls. But his interest in advocacy trumped his career concerns, and he called Mr. Verstynen, knowing he would need a partner if he were going to undertake the mapping of a zombie brain.
“I was driving in the middle of Pennsylvania when I got the phone call from Brad,” says Mr. Verstynen, who was in the process of moving to his second postdoctoral position, at the University of Pittsburgh. His first response, he says, was, “Have you gone mad?” After three weeks of consulting with senior faculty advisers about the risks, the benefits, the time commitment, and the potential reactions from peers, he started brainstorming a zombie noggin with Mr. Voytek using online Google documents and video chats.
“They built the 3-D model of the zombie brain and just ran with it,” Mr. Mogk recalls.
Working on their own time and drawing from their extensive knowledge of the zombie genre, they went through standard symptoms of the undead and presented a neural explanation for each one. For example, zombies have a desire to devour the living, or “reactive-impulsive aggression,” which is probably due to orbitofrontal-cortex damage, they said. The zombie also has a lumbering walk. They hypothesized that the wide, awkward gait of the undead was a sign of cerebral ataxia, a disorder caused by damage to the small cauliflower-looking region at the base of the brain, called the cerebellum. They also tackled the causes of impulse-control problems, language difficulties, memory loss, and attention disorders in the lively corpses.
“What we’re talking about is an introduction to neuroscience,” Mr. Verstynen says. “We’ve always had this eye out for how we can communicate science, and zombies were a flexible metaphor.”
Above all, he adds, “what we really want to do is trick people into learning something.”
Culture Wars
As the two perfected the model of the zombie brain, they constructed a framework for its presentation and gave talks on their respective coasts. At a zombie conference, Mr. Verstynen remembers an Army medic who asked a question related to a past patient who had been stabbed in the forehead. The patient survived but underwent a significant personality shift. In her question, she related the knowledge of the orbitofrontal cortex she gained from the zombie talk to the patient’s symptoms. “She made this brilliant connection, and she didn’t come in thinking about neuroscience or knowing about it,” he says. “That, for me, was the moment where I was like, ‘This works.’”
Walter Schneider, Mr. Verstynen’s adviser at the U. of Pittsburgh, was skeptical of the zombie project. He periodically plugged Mr. Verstynen’s name into Google to check where the zombie research arose on the list of hits.
“It’s a fine ancillary activity,” Mr. Schneider says, “but it’s a problem if it’s what you’re most known for.”
Mr. Schneider’s approval of the zombie research hinged on whether or not Mr. Verstynen could maintain his high productivity in the lab at the same time. Mr. Verstynen has produced more than 20 scientific publications since he earned his Ph.D. six years ago. Mr. Voytek has a maintained a strong record, too, having published two papers and submitted three others for review since the beginning of this year.
“There’s a stigma,” Mr. Voytek says of outreach work like his, “and the feeling among researchers over all is that it’s fine as long as you prioritize the research.”
The result is that researchers with an inclination for outreach must carefully manage their time and borrow capital from their research successes to justify public speaking. It’s a tricky balancing act, says Catherine Trower, research director of the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, at Harvard University. The model for faculty entering tenure-track positions, she says, is tilted toward letting research demands outweigh outreach projects.
Universities should find ways to promote and reward outreach efforts, she says, because they are critical to cultivating interest in science. “We’re losing and turning off a whole generation of potential scholars,” she says.
Zombie-brain research “is the very kind of thing that we should be encouraging postdocs, young scholars—whoever—to do,” Ms. Trower adds. “We want to attract young people to science.”
Only 17 percent of high-school seniors are proficient in math and interested in pursuing science, technology, engineering, or math, the so-called STEM fields, according to a study published in December by the Business-Higher Education Forum. And just 16 percent of college undergraduates earn a degree in one of the those fields, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
“Science,” Mr. Verstynen says, “is losing the culture war.”
The common zombie, he believes, can help combat that.
Before leaving his postdoctoral position at Pittsburgh, Mr. Verstynen gave a talk about zombies late one evening, over popcorn and beer, for his colleagues in the neuroscience center. “I expected around 12 people and, I was amazed, it was like 50,” he recalls. The crowd included Mr. Schneider, his adviser, who was concerned going in that zombie neuroscience wouldn’t be funny to neuroscientists.
“A joke that falls flat isn’t fun for anybody,” Mr. Schneider says. “But, in his case, he executed it well.” He even went up to Mr. Verstynen afterward and gave him a few ideas for more neurological explanations of zombie symptoms.
“Brad and I play it a little risky sometimes,” Mr. Verstynen says. “But it could get a lot of people interested in something that I’m really passionate about. It’s a nice merger of science and nerd-dom.”